a couple books
Interesting. According to OECD numbers, Canada leads the G8 in broadband access, and comes in second in the OECD. Korea\'s way out in the lead, though. I blame Ragnarok Online.
I went over to the UW bookstore today and picked up a couple books. One is entirely Eric\'s fault. He pointed out Paul Graham and instructed us to read his essays. So I read a few. His Hackers and Painters essay is quite good (despite his perverse obsession with LISP and his occasional barbs at Java), so I bought the book of the same name.
His nerds essay is probably more interesting for the general non-programmer audience out there. My highschool experience wasn\'t nearly as bad, seeing my highschool was neither American or suburban (the latter being by far the more significant as far as I can tell). I can still relate, though.
The other book is mostly Matt\'s fault. Joel \"on software\" Spolsky posted his foreword to Coder To Developer, which I found myself largely agreeing with.
See, here\'s the thing. I\'m not a hacker. I\'m not even a terribly good programmer. Well, okay, I\'m good enough to stay employed and get decent employee reviews, but I don\'t personally think I\'m terribly good. I don\'t do any programming in my spare time (I\'ll maybe do a little messing with PHP for the website, but I really can\'t bring myself to do that very much). That\'s mostly because I don\'t really have any ideas for projects, but even if I come up with something, I can\'t bring myself to start. I sometimes think it would be a good idea to get involved in some open source project, but then when it comes down to it, my experiences with \"the community\" have been less than pleasant. I have no problem with coming up with something and releasing it to the world, but if I have to deal with a bunch of insufferable wonks and their politics, I\'d rather just keep to myself, thanks.
So I\'d basically like to change all of that. School did nothing to help me become a decent programmer (I was delusionally hoping it would when I got out of highschool). The only thing for it is to work on it myself.
Too bad I still can\'t think up a decent project to get started with...